Death of a Second Wife

by Maria Hudgins

  But Chet didn’t run into the bunker. He ran past it, up and over the ridge to the north. Hoping I’d downed enough orange juice to keep my blood sugar up for a long chase, I followed, but Chet was faster than I was. He steadily put more ground between us as he skittered down the next slope, over glacier-smoothed boulders, and up another ridge.

  I barely made it to the top of the next ridge, puffing, my leg muscles burning, threatening to seize up. I had to stop. Damn him. Fleeing from the police would make things a hundred times worse. Eventually they would catch him. Kronenberg had his passport.

  I caught a glimpse of Chet’s plaid shirt. He was heading for the river valley below and to the north of the meadow from which the parasailers launched themselves. Below and north of the high plateau where Anton Spektor’s glider and plane probably still sat idle. If only I could get up there. If only that mechanic would be there. I might be able to talk him into flying me over the valley. I could promise him payment as soon as I got back to my credit cards. But the plane couldn’t land in the valley. Bad idea. Even if I found Chet, I couldn’t stop him. Glider probably wouldn’t work either, I thought. But I didn’t know for sure. Plus, what were the odds I’d find the mechanic and talk him into such a harebrained-sounding plan? Even without the language barrier, I didn’t think I could pull it off.

  My gaze swerved from the plateau down to the meadow. There, I saw three or four parasails laid out on the grass and perhaps a half-dozen people standing around. I didn’t stop to think because I knew my fear of heights would talk me out of it. I stumbled down the hill, fell over an exposed root, clambered to my feet, and stumbled the last few yards to the level of the meadow. I approached the strangers, shouting as I ran, “Does anyone speak English?”

  One girl grabbed the silken canopy to which she was tethered and backed up, wide-eyed with fear. Who is this crazy woman?

  “Please! I have to go down there! Quickly!”

  “I speak English,” a young man in baggy cargo shorts said.

  How to explain? My husband is . . . No. That would sound like I was chasing a wayward spouse. My ex-husband is . . . That sounded worse. Sudden inspiration. “Were any of you here a few days ago when my son Patrick wanted to try this?”

  Luck!

  The kid who spoke English pointed to another young man and said, “That guy. Patrick. You took him up.”

  “Ah, yes.” The second kid spoke English, too, but with an accent. “Patrick. He loved it. He wants to take lessons.” He looked around as if expecting to see Patrick behind me.

  We were wasting time.

  “I am Patrick’s mother, and I want to try it too. Can one of you take me?”

  Incredulous looks all around. I could practically hear them thinking, This old woman? Are you kidding me?

  “I know it sounds stupid, but for reasons of my own, I really need to do this. Please. I’ll pay you anything you ask.”

  It seemed to take forever, but the same kid who took Patrick up stepped forward and began giving me instructions. And more instructions. I tried my best to listen, but the ringing in my ears blocked out his voice. I heard “run” and then I heard, “run like hell.” I hoped that was the main thing I had to remember. I could do that.

  I must be crazy! This is not going to work. Should I warn him we’re looking for a man somewhere in the valley? Better not. I’ll spring that on him after we’re aloft. Oh, God. Aloft. I clamped my jaws together to still my chattering teeth.

  Someone handed me a helmet and a pair of protective glasses. My jumping partner strapped me into a harness and clipped a big pack to his own back. He hitched up an incredible number of lines, draped some over his shoulders and grabbed some with his hands. A few feet behind him lay a broad expanse of red and white cloth, billowing in the breeze even as it lay on the ground.

  Turning me toward the precipice over which we were shortly to plunge, my partner clicked some things behind me, linking us together. Point of no return.

  “When I say go, go!”

  I ran like hell, but it was tough, trying to run without tangling my legs up with his. Then, no more than a foot from the edge, I tripped. Expecting to fall to my death, amazingly, I didn’t fall at all. I rose. We were off!

  Once in the air, too late to change my mind, I started enjoying it. The valley far below looked like a toy town with patchwork fields and dark green woodlands. Orange-roofed houses and thin grey roads. Sunlight glinting off ripples on the river winding through the U-shaped valley. Wind in my hair. My own feet dangling beneath me.

  Find Chet! You’re not doing this for fun. Looking down, I despaired of ever spotting him from this height. Even the cars looked tiny from here, and Chet was wearing a plaid shirt and jeans—hardly the outfit I’d have chosen for easy recognition. A blaze-orange jump suit would have been nice.

  Since I hadn’t told my partner why I wanted to do this, I figured I’d better play it casual. I turned and looked at him, smiled, and said, “Can you make us turn?”

  He obliged. With a shift of his body and hands, he started us turning to the left. Swinging out, it was easier to see what was below me on the left side. I figured once Chet got to the valley floor, he’d probably follow the river, so I pointed to the right. “Let’s go that way. Follow the river.”

  After a couple of minutes following the river and seeing nothing of note, I realized we were traveling upstream, toward the Matterhorn and toward LaMotte. Chet would be running away from LaMotte. I held out my left hand. “Can we go back that way?” In a wide arc, we swerved around and a fresh wind lifted us up, rather alarmingly. The rooftops below started shrinking. Oh dear. I pointed down. Lower.

  Over my shoulder, I heard, “I can’t turn this thing just any way! We have to ride the wind!”

  “Sorry! This is such fun!”

  Below us, a road paralleled the river’s path. Traffic on the grey ribbon of asphalt was sparse. Patches of woodland and grassy fields spread out on either side. We dipped lower.

  I saw him. Or at least I saw a man in a reddish shirt and bluish trousers scurrying along the road. He paused, turned, and stuck out his thumb to an oncoming vehicle. It had to be Chet.

  I turned again, this time with a look of distress on my face, and put my hand over my mouth.

  My pilot took the hint. He pointed. “Down?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  We circled around and banked into the wind above what may have been a soccer field. Dropping lower, he shouted across my shoulder, “Don’t drag your feet. Let me do the work.”

  I must have dragged my feet because the next moment we were tumbling together, completely covered by miles and miles of red nylon. Figuring I’d caused this kid enough trouble, I decided to assume a fetal position and let him figure out how to extract us. As soon as I saw daylight and felt the cleats behind me click open, I looked for Chet. And there he was, still standing by the road, about a quarter-mile away, looking at us and at our deflated sail, his arms hanging limply at his sides.

  “I’m ever so grateful,” I said to my young companion, “I want to give you something but I have no money with me. Can you tell me . . .”

  “No, no!” He cut me off, waving his hands in front of him. I think his only wish at that point was to get away from me.

  “I’m awfully sorry,” I said, then decided anything I did to prolong this would only make it worse. I hobbled away, keeping my eye on Chet as I approached the road, thinking, Don’t you dare run! He didn’t.

  Leading him by the elbow, until we were a safe distance from the road, I said, “You won’t get away, Chet. You have to see this through.”

  “I can’t go to jail, Dotsy.”

  “Let’s figure out what to do next.” For the next half hour, we talked about Chet’s total situation: The evidence the police had against him and why they thought they had enough to arrest him. What this could do to our children and grandchildren. What we might do to prove to the police they had the wrong man. Chet had a disgustingly negative attitude. T
hroughout our discussion I kept accentuating the positive, trying to convince him his situation wasn’t hopeless, and reminding him that he was a millionaire now, but he’d never see a penny of his inheritance if he ran away.

  My legs were bleeding. Chet searched his pockets for something to clean me up but found nothing. The kid packed up his parasail and left, heading toward a cluster of houses near the road.

  “Let’s walk over there,” I said, pointing to the same cluster of houses, “and see if we can call a taxi.”

  “To take us where?”

  “Into LaMotte. You have your wallet with you? Good. We can pay the cabbie and then we can pay a visit to the Black Sheep.”

  Chet shook his head. “We’ve been over all that. The bartender doesn’t remember me.”

  “I have a couple of ideas, Chet. Will you trust me? Turn yourself in to the police. I’ll get you out. I promise.”

  He just looked at me.

  “Trust me?” I gave him my sternest look.

  He stood there for what seemed like an hour, shoulders drooping, eyes cast down, but finally he nodded. No more than a slight dip of the head but it would have to do.

  Twenty-Four

  I caught my breath as our little electric cab rolled by the LaMotte train station, praying that Chet wouldn’t jump out and make a run for it. I had the driver take us past the police station first, so I could see what we were dealing with in terms of what was where. If the police station had been across the street from the Black Sheep, for instance, it would have been too risky for us to walk in the front door of the bar, but it wasn’t.

  Just as I thought, the tables in the Black Sheep weren’t all visible from the long bar. An L on one end held several tables and ended in a hall leading back to the restrooms. The place was nearly empty at this time in the afternoon. The bartender looked up and nodded at us when we entered, but not as if he recognized either of us. In fact, it wasn’t the same bartender as the one I had talked to that night when Lettie and I were there.

  “Where did you sit that night?” I asked.

  “I told you, I don’t remember much about that night.”

  “You may not remember the name of the man you were talking to or how many drinks you had, but you can remember where you sat. You’ve only been in here once. Only one table in this room, and only one chair at that table should feel right. Which one, Chet? You sat here for hours, facing one of these walls. Do any of the pictures on the walls look familiar? You got up at least once and went to the bathroom. Where did you get up from? Which way did you have to walk to get to the bathroom? Did you go to the bar and order drinks or did the man you were talking to get the drinks? Or did someone bring them to your table? What feels right?”

  “I was sitting in here.” Chet shambled over to a table within the L and stopped. He walked around the table, put his hands on the back of the chair facing a row of downhill racing photos. “I was sitting here.”

  “And from the bar, the bartender wouldn’t have been able to see you.”

  Chet turned and looked. “No.”

  “Which explains why he didn’t remember you. Now, think again. Your glass is empty. What happens next?”

  “I turn around and catch the eye of a girl. I hold up two fingers.”

  “A girl. Good. And she brought you and your friend two more.”

  “She must have.”

  “We need to find that girl.”

  “Let’s talk to the bartender.”

  I thought about it. The longer the police had to keep looking for Chet the greater the chance they’d run into us, and they’d never believe Chet was just about to turn himself in. By this time Odile would have told them about Chet running and me chasing after him. “Let’s go to the police station,” I said as gently as I could.

  “I can do it. I don’t want you to go with me.”

  I understood how he felt, but wasn’t sure I could trust him to do it alone. Ah well, I’d already done all I could do. I’d brought him this far and given him hope. If he fled now, I wouldn’t try to stop him. “Give me some money before you leave.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “You have a wallet and I don’t. I may need some money before I go back to the house, and I’d like your driver’s license, too. You won’t need it where you’re going.”

  Chet pulled the laminated card and a few variously colored Swiss francs from his wallet, handed them to me, sort of saluted, and walked out. I stepped into the main room and seated myself at the bar. While the bartender was pouring me a Coke, I asked him, “Do you have any way of checking who was waiting tables on the night of—let’s see—it would have been last Sunday. I was talking to our waitress that night about a restaurant she recommended in San Moritz. I wrote down the name but I lost the little slip of paper and we’re going there tomorrow.”

  “I can check the time cards, but I can’t give out any home addresses or phone numbers.” He toweled the bar in front of me and deposited my glass of Coke.

  “I understand. But she might be coming in today, mightn’t she? And if so, I could stop back by.”

  He couldn’t have heard my last few words because he had already disappeared through the doorway behind the bar. He came out a minute later and said, “Kelly Wheeler. She won’t be in tonight because she works at the Edelweiss restaurant on Saturday evenings.

  Perfect. I thought I had seen a sign for that restaurant but I was wrong. I couldn’t find it. After wandering a few narrow streets, I dropped in at the post office and asked directions. Once seated in the sleek, modern Edelweiss, I ordered a salad and asked for Kelley Wheeler. Not really dinner hour yet, most of the tables were already full. Kelly turned out to be an American college student taking a semester abroad. When she brought my salad, I introduced myself and asked her to have a seat, but she told me they weren’t allowed to sit with customers.

  “You’re from Virginia?” she said, taking my menu. “Wait. Is this about the bunker murders at the Chateau Merz?”

  “Are we that well known?” I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. “Yes. I’m staying there.” Without revealing my relationship to the victims, I asked, “Have the police talked to you? I’m not asking you to tell me what you told them, but I need to know if they’ve talked to you.”

  “No. They came in and talked to Hans but not to me.”

  “I wonder why they didn’t,” I said. “You were working at the Black Sheep that night, weren’t you? That was last Sunday night.”

  Kelly scratched her chin against the menu she held to her chest. “Yeah. I was.” She paused for a minute. “They probably didn’t talk to me because my name wasn’t on the work sheet for that night. They probably tried to talk to Ursula because her name was on the sheet, but she’s been out all week. They called me at the last minute.”

  “Wouldn’t Hans”—I assumed that was the bartender—“have told them about the substitution?”

  “He probably wouldn’t remember. When they get busy, he pays no attention to us.”

  I dug into my pants pocket and pulled out Chet’s driver’s license. “Take a real good look at this man. Might he have been there, possibly sitting at a table in the section near the bathrooms?”

  She looked at the photo, then the name. “Lamb. Your husband?”

  “No.”

  She squinted, wrinkled her nose, twisted her mouth to one side. “Yes! Absolutely! He and another guy—blond hair, hefty guy. This guy”—she touched Chet’s photo with her pinkie finger—“was drinking scotch and sodas and the other guy was drinking beer. The blond guy left and this guy went on drinking until he was so wasted he couldn’t walk straight.”

  “That sounds like him.”

  “I was worried about him, even. Oh my God! I can’t believe it. This is the same man. I was worried about him, so I told Hans I was leaving for a minute because I wanted to make sure this guy didn’t pass out in the street, you know. Hans paid no attention so I’m sure he wouldn’t remember it.”

  At t
his point, Kelly apparently forgot the rules and sat in the chair opposite me.

  “I followed him down the street and he turned on Wilhelmstrasse, then he turned back because he was obviously lost and he walked past me, so I asked him if I could help him, and he said he was looking for the elevator.” She laughed. “I said, ‘the elevator?’ like—I figured he was delusional or something, but then I remembered about the elevator they have that goes up to the houses”—she pointed up—“where the Chateau Merz is. We make deliveries there sometimes. We send someone with the food to this door where we ring a buzzer and they let us in so we can leave the food in the tunnel.”

  “That’s right. I’ve picked up food there myself.”

  Kelly looked over her shoulder as if to check whether she was being watched by the headwaiter. “I led him around and down Dorfstrasse, but when we got there, there was already a couple with a key to the tunnel. They said they were staying at one of the houses up above, but not Chateau Merz. I’d remember if they said Chateau Merz. They told me which one, but I forget what they said. Anyway, I sort of whispered to the woman and told her what the problem was, and she said they would make sure he got home. So I left him at the door to the tunnel and that’s the last I saw of him.”

  I prodded her for anything else she could recall about this couple or the house where they were staying, but to no avail. Nevertheless, it was enough. There weren’t more than three or four other houses that had access to the elevator, so I shouldn’t have too much trouble finding the couple who could tell police exactly where Chet was, and in what state, late that Sunday night.

  * * * * *

  Back at the house, I found Odile in the kitchen and Juergen in his little office on the stairwell landing. Simultaneously typing on his computer and talking on the phone, he didn’t hear or see me until I stepped around the side of his desk. He held up one finger and quickly ended his phone conversation. “What’s happening?” He slid his chair back and steered me to the living room. On our way down the stairs, I learned that Juergen already knew about Chet’s arrest. Somehow he’d heard that Chet turned himself in. I was relieved to know Chet hadn’t chickened out.